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Germany's energy policy

Does not make sense -- from Forbes:

Germany -- Insane Or Just Plain Stupid?
After the tsunami destroyed the Fukushima plants, Germany moved quickly to shut eight nuclear power plants, and made plans do away completely with their nuclear capability. Despite the best safety record of any industry in the country, and the critical role nuclear plays in fueling German industry, Germany�s past experience with large tsunamis was just too horrific to ignore. And Germany�s strong economy and commitment to protect the environment were small prices to pay for Chancellor Merkel to shore up her weak coalition with the Free Democrats. Maybe she can ask Greece for help later.

But don�t worry. Germany is building about 25 clean coal-fired power plants to offset the loss of nuclear and address Germany�s admittedly �unaffordably expensive and unreliable� renewable portfolio (Der Spiegel). The German Green Party can now celebrate the opening of a 2,200 MW coal-fired power plant near Cologne. It started spewing out its annual, relatively clean, 13 million tons of CO2, and other nasties, so much lower than those older dirty coal plants that would have put out 15 million tons of CO2 for the same power output.

So the plant can be called "green" if it produces 13.34% less CO2? Such a low bar to environmental correctness. Germany had a flawless record regarding reactor safety -- they should be setting the example and developing new technologies -- Thorium. Now they have to deal with all of the pollution and additional deaths from Coal. Time to refresh Seth Godin's blog post from March 22, 2011:

The triumph of coal marketing
Do you have an opinion about nuclear power? About the relative safety of one form of power over another? How did you come to this opinion?

Here are the stats, and here's the image. A non-exaggerated but simple version of his data:

For every person killed by nuclear power generation, 4,000 die due to coal, adjusted for the same amount of power produced... You might very well have excellent reasons to argue for one form over another. Not the point of this post. The question is: did you know about this chart? How does it resonate with you?

I first blogged this back in March 24, 2011. Nuclear is cheap and safe. We have a lot of coal and it too is reasonably safe (we are talking about deaths per TerraWatt Hour -- this is a lot of energy:

1,000 Watt = 1 KiloWatt
1,000 KiloWatts = 1 MegaWatt
1,000 MegaWatt = 1 GigaWatt and
1,000 GigaWatt = 1 TerraWatt

The raw numbers were 161 deaths per TW for coal and 0.04 deaths per TW for nuke - 4025 times more. Posted by DaveH at September 3, 2012 2:27 PM